Oh boy. So that's what our skyline looked like around about 1912. Not
exactly the kind of place you want to be spending time if you have
asthma. Or, you know, lungs. A little more than 100 years before this
photo was taken, the whole shoreline was covered by a forest that had
been there for thousands of years, full of ancient oak trees and deer
and wolves and eagles and bears. We started cutting down the trees as
soon as the Town of York was founded. And we thought nothing of chucking
our garbage and dead animals and piss and shit into the lake. Which we
then drank from. Things only got worse as the Industrial Revolution
kicked into high gear. In the mid-1800s, we got railways along the
waterfront and with them came massive coal-burning factories like the
ones in this photo. They say that by the early days of the 20th century,
all the walls in downtown Toronto were black — brick walls hidden
beneath a thick layer of toxic soot.

This post originally appeared on the Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog,which tells stories about the history of Toronto. You can read more highlights from it here, or visit it yourself here.